Re: Registration of some code pages

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>]

* Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>Ideally the registry (or maybe a new one specific to the Web) reflects  
>what implementations do. If we all agree that "big5" means "windows 950"  
>than "big5" should just mean that even though originally the intention  
>might have been different. After all, that is what the running code is  
>doing. That would give the most clear guidance to new implementors and  
>allows existing implementors to converge.

These days we have legacy encodings primarily to support legacy systems
and legacy content; where systems recognize encodings by some identifier
and that identifier means different things for different systems, then
there may be little interest in convergence. Web browsers generally con-
sume the same content and are supposed to be interchangable, so there is
considerable interest and willingness to converge, but that is not the
case in systems where generator and consumer are more tightly coupled,
slowly upgrading to some Unicode encoding is often a better option for
such systems than fiddling with intricate legacy encoding details.

Put simply, if my system has always turned 0x5C with some label into a
yen sign, I would not change it so it turns it into a backslash instead,
as that would have unforseeable security and compatibility implications.

Easing the pain in dealing with such differences and aiding those who
have the opportunity and will to converge requires documentation. If
someone comes up with a good overview in some referencable form (like
an Informational RFC detailing what popular implementations like .NET,
Sun's JDK, iconv, ICU, MLang, and so on, do) that would be useful in-
formation to link in the registry.

Information fragments (like only "Some Microsoft products do this" or
"Some popular web browsers do that") is of little utility there, and
for labels that have existed for considerable time it should not be a
goal of the registry to aid in convergence as that is unrealistic. In
particular note that we have very few people on this list, so there'd
be little review of changes in the registry.

What I would support is giving well-defined behaviors proper names in
the registry (with the possible caveat that the assignment is for do-
cumentational purposes only and the name should not be supported di-
rectly) if the behavior is not expected to change, so you can document
your library by saying "label 'yyy' is treated as 'xxx'", although that
would have the problem Shawn already mentioned.
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